On the Nightstand:

On the Turntable:

On the Tube:

Our Sponsors:

Old Stuff:

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." (Mark Twain)

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Famous Potatoes*

It's never good when the state I grew up in appears in the news. Although the Idaho Falls Post Register is embargoed behind a subscription wall (no doubt to control the crushing traffic), Rising Hegemon has the story:

The predictions of local weather forecasters are not usually national news, except in the case of KPVI meteorologist Scott Stevens. Stevens has recently gained national attention for his theory about Hurricane Katrina and deadly storms in general.

He believes the Japanese mafia created Katrina as revenge for Hiroshima. The Japanese group is one of several, Stevens says, that likely possess the required technology: an electromagnetic generator developed in 1976 in Russia. He predicts the gangsters, Japan's Yakuza, intend to destroy another U.S. city within the year, probably by unleashing an earthquake or volcanic eruption in the West....

He first hit on the theory about six years ago.

"I was having trouble with accuracy of forecasting in 1998 and 1999," he told The Science Detective, an Internet radio program.

He stumbled onto a Web site describing the concept and technology, which is detailed on Stevens' Web site, www.weatherwars.info. He says a little-known oversight in physical laws makes it possible to easily generate large amounts of electromagnetic energy to create and control storms.

Physicists say this is preposterous, pointing to conservation of energy -- the basic physical law dictating that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. No violation of this principal has ever been found.

He points to mysterious chirping that's audible on shortwave radio (evidence of Russia's weather-controlling machine, he said) and "unnatural" cloud patterns as evidence supporting his theory. He said he was convinced by a Montana cold front he saw last year.

"I just got sick to my stomach because these clouds were unnatural, and that meant they had it on all the time," he said. "I was left trying to forecast the intent of some organization rather than the weather of this planet."

Stevens said oddities in Katrina's behavior support his theory.

"The center of the storm passing over the national hurricane center, that was a clear calling card," he said. "It's saying, 'You idiots! Look what we can do.' The whole behavior of the storm was curious."

In my own defense, I should point out that Idaho Falls is in the extreme southern part of the state (or, as rational Idahoans know it, "Upper Utah"), while I grew up in the north Idaho town of Coeur d' Alene - where the meteorologists are mostly sane and the neo-Nazis are scared.

* - This is actually the motto that appears on Idaho auto license plates. And some Idahoans wonder why the rest of the country laughs at them.